From: John N. <joh...@mo...> - 2004-05-19 19:36:54
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Daniel Slater wrote: >> enabled. >> * Support device aliasing, e.g alias="hda2" >> >> >> > >I was thinking this morning and it occurred to me that maybe we don't really >need device aliasing. Instead of putting an entry in the XML file with an >alias option, would it not be possible to patch the linux block drivers so >that the mapping would happen automatically? i.e. /dev/hda1 would be mapped >to \Device\Harddisk0\Partition1. Then the entries in the XML file and the >cobd devices would be reserved for mapping files to drives. - This should >make it particularly easy to get a dual boot system up and running. > That's not a bad idea... but it should only be considered an *alternative*, not a replacement, for the cobd's. Otherwise, the mounting of images has to occur within colinux through loopbacking, everybody has to change everything around, and something is going to not work anymore for somebody. What comes to mind for me is that we patch the kernel's IDE driver (or just make it configurably replaceable). The replacement (or patched version) knows that it is in colinux, and does not attempt to hardware probe available devices on bootup as it normally would, but rather just asks the colinux-daemon for what is available. The windows dd.exe utility has code to probe the windows devices already, and learning which of those devices has already been mounted (by windows) should be fairly trivial to discover and remove from the list of available devices. Further, any device configured in the XML to become a cobd would also have to removed from the list, or else we need to ensure that a device cannot be doubly mounted. On a side note, I have always been curious about one point... if Windows doesn't lock down hardware it isn't using, why can't we access non-native partitions directly? Why all the IPC? |